Bugliosi Tells Why O.J. Verdict Left Him in `Outrage'

OUTRAGE

By
Vincent Bugliosi W.W. Norton
; 356 pages; $25
Just when interest in the
O.J. Simpson
trial has begun to wane, along comes everybody's favorite legal warrior, Vincent Bugliosi, to kick a few "uncomfortable truths" around, as his editor puts it.

Already hitting best-seller lists around the country, "Outrage" brings back the tough-as-nails Bugliosi many remember from his first blockbuster, "Helter Skelter," in which he explained in conversational but no-nonsense terms how he prosecuted the Charles Manson trial.

Certainly the fact that Bugliosi came out of the Los Angeles district attorney's office with a record of 105 convictions out of 106 felony jury trials and 21 murder convictions without a single loss gives him a credibility that none of the "talking heads" (his term for lawyers-turned-TV-commentators) could muster during thousands of hours of TV coverage.

Refreshingly, at least at first, Bugliosi minces no words. "For several weeks after the verdict I was so angry I could have eaten nails -- and I'm still angry," he says.

Having never doubted that "Simpson committed these murders," Bugliosi believes that the prosecution gave a D-minus performance and that jurors "(1) clearly did not have too much intellectual firepower and (2) were biased in Simpson's favor, most likely from the start."

The defense lawyers were hardly the "Dream Team" the media so obsequiously portrayed, Bugliosi adds, because most of them had little or no experience trying murder cases -- Robert Shapiro is best known as a "plea bargainer," Johnnie Cochran a civil lawyer, Alan Dershowitz an appellate lawyer, F. Lee Bailey a has- been since he botched the Patty Hearst case -- and taken together were "spectacularly ordinary," achieving no more than a D or c-minus grade.

Judge Lance Ito (or "Judge Ego," as he says reporters called him) "specialized in making patently erroneous rulings, one after another" (allowing TV cameras, shortening courtroom days to 3 p.m., sustaining an "aberrational" number -- 7,000 -- of objections, inviting celebrities to chambers). But Ito wrongly and "irrevocably changed . . . the entire complexion of the trial" when he allowed the defense to ask Mark Fuhrman if he had used the word "nigger."

Bugliosi agrees with prosecutor Chris Darden that the incendiary word was certain to "blind the jury" and thus violate Section 352 of the California Evidence Code, which states that evidence can be excluded if it "create(s) substantial danger of undue prejudice." That prejudice became the "race card" the defense ultimately used.

Although everybody gets a trouncing here -- especially the media, for what he sees as shallow, sensational, sloppy and biased reporting -- Bugliosi delivers his most blistering criticism of the prosecution, from the moment District Attorney Gil Garcetti moved the trial downtown where jury makeup would benefit the defense to Marcia Clark's refusal to pay attention to focus groups and polls that showed "black women viewed Marcia Clark 'extremely negatively,' " according to the jury selection expert the DA's office used.

Mistakenly believing that black women would "identify with Nicole," Clark began withholding evidence she apparently thought that the jury would not understand, including Simpson's "suicide" note ("if he was innocent, why would he want to commit suicide?"); the passport, disguise, gun and thousands of dollars he took with him in the Bronco; his statement to police in which "he admits dripping blood all over his car and home and on his driveway around the time of the murders"; photos of Simpson wearing gloves of the exact design and size as the gloves found on the scene, and so forth.

Naturally, Darden's insistence that Simpson put the glove on is seen as a huge blunder, but here and elsewhere, Bugliosi offers canny ideas only a veteran prosecutor could invent to lessen the damage of such mistakes. He also provides instruction on strategy that makes prosecutors look dumb for letting themselves appear to be suppressing key information and for not anticipating defense introduction of evidence -- the recital film, for example, in which Simpson appeared happy, contradicting prosecution witnesses who said he had been gloomy and threatening.

"Outrage" is the heady, brutally candid, irreverent and authoritative book for which trial watchers have been hungry for too long.

Readers might not agree with Bugliosi (he denies that racism is ingrained in the Los Angeles Police Department or that Fuhrman could have tried to frame Simpson), but they won't stop reading until the end, when Bugliosi delivers parts of what could have been a summation that might have turned the trial around.